Kindergarten Blog 4/1

Dear Kindergarten Families,

This week was the second week of collecting donations for Ali Forney, an organization that helps unhoused teenagers. Sixth grade is running the school-wide penny drive, and three sixth graders came to our class on Wednesday to tell us more about Ali Forney. Kindergarteners have loved watching the donations we’ve collected grow! The penny drive will continue on until Pesach break.

The kindergartener scientists are now experts on what living things need to live and grow, and this week we asked the important question of where living things get the things they need to live and grow! We spoke about environments, and how different living things live in different environments that give them all the things they need. We then thought about our own environments and started to make pop-up pictures of human environments, complete with gardens and grocery stores that give us food, homes that give us shelter, and parks that give us space to run around and have trees that give us oxygen. 

In Judaics, we are continuing to break down not just our Shabbat songs but our tefilot, and have taken this week to think about how we can make tefilah meaningful to ourselves, and have been really working on strengthening our connections to ourselves, the people we care about, and God as we pray each day.

In Hebrew, we continued with Kaspion and talked about what it means to be brave and what being a good friend looks like. The children went around and gave examples of times they have been a good friend and helped others. We started learning about aviv (spring) and its associated words. We talked about the signs of spring being nitzanim (buds) – an especially fun word since it’s Nitzan’s name!

In Math we continued our unit measurement, adding weight to the ways things can be measured.  Using pan balancing scales children predicted which of two items were heavier and then checked out their predictions.  They also practiced how heavy items were when measured with snap cubes.  We also explored a kitchen scale, predicting how much different items weighed. 

In Phonics we introduced the vowels, changing the chorus of Old Macdonald from EIEIO to “AEIOU!” We talked about the fact that every word has at least one vowel and found the vowels in each of our names.  Listening for the middle sounds, which are often vowels,  in each word will be important as we continue to sound out words in reading and writing.

In Writing we looked at books that have speech bubbles and some children have started using speech bubbles to show what the people in their stories are saying. 

In Social Studies children are finishing up their family projects as we move into our next study of maps.  One group began exploring maps of the world, Brooklyn, and the NYC Subway system.  This unit will mostly be about children creating their own maps of familiar places. 

As always, our week concluded with Kabbalat Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom,

Atalya, Dawn, and Anat